The Detour (23 page)

In the dark, listening to my own breath slowing again, my own confused and irritated sighs, I could make out what appeared to be fields, and farther away, the low, dark silhouettes of olive or citrus trees, and farther yet, darker, wilder woods: oak and
willow and hazelnut. In those woods, I presumed, there was flowing water of some kind, a place where I might drink and wash. But I wasn’t about to wander around an unknown forest late at night.

Now that we’d finally arrived, I could stop worrying about Cosimo’s immediate well-being and begin to worry about both of us: we were fugitives now, like rabbits cowering behind a bush—whether or not Cosimo was willing to face that fact. And I was not only a fugitive waiting to be stalked by Germans, but a prisoner of my Italian hosts, unwanted and untrusted, if Rosina’s reaction was any indication. But as long as I was here, I deserved at least a prisoner’s rations and perhaps a bath as well.

I followed the sounds of voices into a side door that opened onto a softly lit
terrazza
with an outdoor dining table spread with small coffee cups, a bottle of some kind of liqueur, and a blue plate of white-powdered biscotti. Here was where they must have sat: two or three of the village
polizia
, paying an informal call, social on the surface, business underneath.
We are not meaning to worry you, Signora Digirolamo
.

Had they received a telegram from Rome, or directly from Herr Keller, pretending to be concerned? What version of the truth had reached the local authorities?

The
terrazza
side door led into a large farm kitchen with an immense wooden table at its center, piled with three mounds of pale dough. As soon as they saw me, everything stopped. A matronly, gray-haired woman occupied the spot closest to the doorway, hands on her wide hips. Next to her stood a younger woman, a more fastidious version of Rosina. Beside her was a
man—not Cosimo, but close to his age, gaunt and unshaven. And next to him: a doddering grandfather type with silver stubble on his chin, wearing a white undershirt.

The four of them had taken their positions along one long side of the table, like generals planning for a battle. Seeing me, the older woman made a whimpering sound and flung up her hands against her tobacco-colored cheeks. She looked ready to faint, but no one rushed for a chair. The younger woman’s lips were parted, mouth open with surprise. The man next to her looked ready to attack me, but he steadied himself against the table, palms flat against the floured surface. The old man remained in place, hands in his pockets, eyes watering profusely.

I had come bearing death. There is no ruder visitor.

“
Buongiorno
,” I tried, but no one responded.

On the far side of the kitchen sat a cracked, white, shallow bowl in which stood a large pitcher of water. Condensation freckled its bulging ceramic middle. I hadn’t had anything to drink since midday, which explained the pounding headache. I longed for just a sip of water, and to change these clothes, which smelled of smoke and sweat and spoiled milk.

I held my empty hands in front of my chest, speaking in German because it was the best I could manage. “It wasn’t my fault. I’m sure Cosimo told you that.”

At the sound of Cosimo’s name, the younger woman grabbed the sleeve of the man next to her. He risked a quick, irritated glance in her direction before fixing his dark eyes back on me.

“Where is Cosimo, anyway?”
Scheisse
, they didn’t understand. “
Dov’è Cosimo?
” Surely I had that right.

I took another step toward the water. To reach it, I would have to squeeze past all four of them. Another step, but this time the matriarch set a hand on the table in front of her, just centimeters from the rolling pin, panting so heavily with her own bottled-up fear that I was afraid she would give herself a heart attack. The old man at the far end was crying silently, the tears dripping unchecked down his cheeks. At least there was no doubt that Cosimo had broken the news.

“I only want a drink of water. That’s all for now. Then I’ll go.”

The younger man, third down the line, lifted his floured hands off the kitchen table and curled them into a boxer’s fists, poised for action. A feline yowl exploded from underneath the table, and I glanced down to see a toddler, happily seated beneath the table’s stout legs, making shapes from a handful of leftover dough. Her eyes met mine and she dropped the grubby fistful, rolled forward onto knees and hands, and scooted toward her mother’s legs.

“
Mi dispiace
,” I tried to say, hoping I’d gotten those syllables right.
I’m sorry
.

There had to be some way to explain that I wasn’t the enemy. In boot camp, they had taught us many things, but not how to say in Italian, French, English or Russian:
Wait
—
it’s not what you’re thinking
. If the war came, as we knew it would, you would need that phrase as you faced a world of enemy strangers. You would advance, village by village and town by town, and see the stunned faces of people who wanted to kill you, who couldn’t understand you, whose lives had been going along just fine—the pasta on the table, the
laundry on the line—until you and your men came stomping up their garden path. If you were carrying a gun, and of course you’d be carrying a gun, you’d shoot. If they were prepared, they would shoot you first. And not over timeless ideals—the perfection of mankind, art and morals and beauty—but in the short term, over something like this: a stupid drink of water.

Until this point, I’d always thought I feared the trenches, the gas, the bombs. But what I’d feared all along, in fact, was this: meeting other people trapped in a situation very similar to my own, all of us frozen in fear and indecision. Paralyzed. How many of my nightmares, sleeping or waking, contained that feeling; how many of my regrets looked back to moments where I’d done nothing, or done too little, too late?

I advanced another step and then lost heart. It wasn’t worth it. But just as I was turning to go, the mother took her own bold step forward, blocking me. The rolling pin was still on the table. Small mercies. But clearly she was comfortable with her small, dark-skinned fists. When she raised them, I pulled my own arms inward and crossed them, elbows over my ribs, like an Egyptian mummy. Let her do it—that was all right. Let her take out her frustrations on me. I wasn’t that fragile. And maybe I even deserved it. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting.

And then those soft, old arms were wrapped around my waist. Baggy flesh enveloped me, and my nose filled with the faint aroma of oregano. Her head was level with my chest, her wide bosom was barely at my navel, and she was pulling me toward her, gripping me, comforting me, dissolving my defenses as she nodded and wept in commiseration:
Va bene. Va bene. Va bene
.

A pummeling would have been easier.

I walked downhill back to the barn where I had last seen Cosimo’s sister, checking frequently over my shoulder to make sure that no one had been compelled to follow. I only needed a moment and the cooling evening air on my skin. There was no reason why a grown man should shed tears upon receipt of sympathy when he did not shed tears upon first sight of the thing itself, the real and ugly and inescapable thing. There was no reason a woman should be kind to a stranger and no reason why a stranger should break down within sight of a grieving mother. There was no reason. And so I kept walking until my gasping stopped, until I could breathe normally and put the moment behind me.

At the barn, I turned the corner, saw the open door, and reached for the iron handle, entering the semi-dark space incautiously, only to be stopped short. The center of the room was lit by a kerosene lantern. At the edge of the golden light, Rosina was seated nude on a stool with her legs in a steel tub, pouring water over the curtain of black hair obscuring her face. My lungs got the message quickly: not a sound, not a breath.

She didn’t hear me for a moment through the water, but then something alerted her. She tilted her head up. The glossy curtain parted, and now there was a smooth white stomach, and bare breasts heavier and more pendulous than a Greek virgin’s, and her eyes, blinking with effort through the soapy, parted hair.

My mind was in several places at once. It was seeing the first original Rembrandt I ever saw, face close to the thickly painted canvas, looking for the source of that Old Master’s light. It was with the first woman I knew half-intimately, before Leonie, and before I’d given up on finding a truly compatible girlfriend.

“Cosimo?” Rosina asked, bringing a forearm up to her breasts and twisting away slightly, still blind.

I should have backed away. I should have turned and run. There was still a moment, while the soap was still in her eyes, before she blinked me into clear view. But I was too slow.

She shrieked, held her breath for a moment, then broke into nervous laughter.

Heart racing, I turned away in confusion, quickly averting my gaze. “I didn’t know—I expected—I thought this was just a barn.”

“You startled me,” she said. “It’s all right. I have a towel. It was only—your face.”

She slipped away on wet, bare feet, leaving dark spots on the outbuilding’s rough plank floor, toward a screen-like partition decorated with a still life of pears and peaches and grapes—poorly drawn, I noticed, now that she wasn’t occupying my full attention. Then I noticed the large iron bed frame in the corner, the old mirror, the dresser, the glass bottles with flowers on the sill of the building’s only four-paned window, the phonograph balanced atop a small fruit crate.

“It
was
a barn,” she explained, her voice muffled behind whatever she was pulling over her head.

When she came back out, she was wearing a white blouse,
with her wet black hair draped over each shoulder, making translucent damp spots just below her clavicle.

“
Signorina
,” I tried, reaching out a hand.

“I’m a decade older than you.”

“
Signora
 …”

“It’s too late for that. ‘Rosina,’ please.” She waited for me to drop my hand. “I offered you a chance to clean up. The water isn’t very warm, but it’s all right and just a little soapy, if you don’t mind using the same tub.”

She misread my expression. “Or if that isn’t good enough for you, we can dump it. But then you’ll have to use cold water.”

“No,” I said, finding my voice. “Don’t go to any trouble. The water is fine.”

The warmth of her earlier laugh was cooling fast, retreating behind an armor of grief and understandable caution. I wanted to reach out a hand and catch it before it had disappeared entirely. But at the same time, I was still feeling an acute embarrassment that locked my feet in place. Furtively, I searched her face for any signs of the same unease, but she was moving purposefully, using her wet towel to mop up some extra water splashed from the galvanized tub, hanging the towel on a hook, rummaging on an open shelf. She looked up.

“Forget it.”

I nodded unconvincingly.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” she insisted.

“I was more concerned—about
your
discomfort, I mean.”

“Ah, yes—
my
discomfort.”

“We haven’t gotten started on the right foot.”

“You mean, by meeting over my brother’s dead body?”

She was right, and there was no pardonable reason for me to be thinking of her hair or her figure, or of the water splashing down into the tub, or of the fact that even now her shirt was open at the throat and slightly wet.

“I’m very sorry.”

She swore softly—not at me, as I thought at first, but at herself. “Damn, I can’t wear this.” She disappeared behind the screen again and came back a minute later changed into a belted black dress, a little too loose in the waist and chest.

“It’s all I have in black.” She sounded angry and looking for a reason to be angrier yet, if only someone would engage her in argument. She patted the spot at the back of her neck where there was a single small button, just beyond her fingers’ reach. “Assist me.”

I fumbled until she grew impatient, pulling away, and tried to do it herself, grabbing the button with such force that it popped off and rolled onto the floor and under the bed, sparking a single German curse word that in turn ignited a torrent of Italian blasphemies.

Rosina sat down on the mattress with her face in her hands. The proper thing would have been to step back silently and leave her in peace.

She looked up, finally, scrubbing her nose with the back of her hand. “If you think I’m handling this well—”

“—well enough.”

“You would, too, if you had a brother like Enzo. It’s just that I’m not surprised. I am, and at the same time, I’m not. I spent too many years worrying.”

I nodded, encouraging her.

“Our mother always expected the best from him, but I guess I’m not the charitable, motherly type. I always expected the worst.”

When I still didn’t move or speak, she began to tell me a story which quickly became a flood of stories—Enzo’s gambling problem in Milan; Enzo’s bad judgment and a failed business deal involving a cousin in Naples; another time they had to urge Enzo to go abroad, and he did, but he didn’t have the sense to stay. But then she heard herself and stopped. “I’m still so furious, but it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”